Subversive Characters

As a reaction to globalisation, consumerism and suppressive systems we are interested in critical and sustainable tendencies, social uprisings and antiauthoritarian practices. We want to explore various european cities by researching and portraying alternate systems and subcultural strategies.

We are interested in the individuals involved in counter-movements, so they will be the focus of our investigations and photographic portraits. The different characters will be represented by important objects of their life. These items will be arranged to display the form of a Latin letter. So the human characters will be represented by typographic characters formed out of their personal belongings …

In total we want to travel 8 European cities. During one stay we will portrait 3–4 activists. Our aim is to finally complete 26 characters to generate a European alphabet of subversion.
As we are following an anti-elitists approach to art, the letter forms of each city will be printed on posters to spread them locally and exhibit them in public space. Choosing this medium to distribute our work definitely addresses the history of posters in the realm of political and social resistances.

In February 2015 we’ve been artists in residence in the city of Tartu (Estonia) to investigate the local scene of subversive thinkers, resulting in the letters A (portraying Siim Vatalin), B (portraying Ilmar Part) and C (portraying Fideelia Signe Roots).